Dead Like You (18 page)

46

Saturday 10 January

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, Mandy thought to herself, her courage suddenly deserting her as she handed her token to the man in the booth of the ghost train ride.

‘Is it scary?’ she asked him.

He was young and good-looking, with a foreign accent – maybe Spanish, she thought.

‘No, is not really scary. Just a little!’ He smiled. ‘Is OK!’

‘Yeah?’

He nodded.

She tottered along inside the railings to the first car. It looked like a wood-panelled Victorian bathtub on rubber wheels. She clambered in unsteadily, her heart in her throat suddenly, and sat down, putting her bag on the seat beside her.

‘Sorry, you can’t take bag. I look after for you.’

Reluctantly she handed it to him. Then he pulled down the metal safety bar and clicked it home, committing her.

‘Smile!’ he said. ‘Enjoy! Is OK, really!’

Shit
, she thought. Then she called out to her friends. ‘Char! Karen!’

But the wind whipped her voice away. The car rumbled forward, without warning crashing through double doors into darkness. The doors banged shut behind her and the darkness was total. In contrast to the blustery sea air, in here it was dry and smelt faintly of hot electrical wiring and dust.

The darkness pressed in all around her. She held her breath. Then the car swung sharply right, picking up speed. She could hear the roar of its wheels echoing around the walls; it was like being on a tube train. Streaks of light shot past her on both sides. She heard a ghostly laugh. Tendrils brushed her forehead and her hair, and she screamed in terror, clenching her eyes shut.

This is dumb
, she thought.
This is so stupid. Why? Why did I do this?

Then the car crashed through more double doors. She opened her eyes to see a long-dead, dusty old man rise up from behind a writing desk and swing head first towards her. She ducked, covering her eyes, her heart pounding, all the courage the alcohol had given her deserting her now.

They went down a sharp incline. She uncovered her eyes to see that the light was fading rapidly and she was back in pitch darkness again. She heard a hissing sound. A hideous, luminous, skeletal snake reared out of the darkness and spat at her, cold droplets of water striking her face. Then a brightly lit skeleton swung out of the darkness and she ducked in terror, convinced it would hit her.

They crashed through more doors.
Oh, God, how long was this going to go on for?

They were travelling fast, downhill, in darkness. She heard a screech, then a horrible cackle of laughter. More tendrils touched her, like a spider crawling through her hair. They crashed through more doors, swung sharply left and, quite suddenly, stopped. She sat for a moment in the pitch darkness, shaking. Then suddenly she felt an arm around her neck.

A human arm. She smelt warm breath on her cheek. Then a voice whispered into her ear. A voice she had never heard before.

She froze in blind panic.

‘Got a little extra for you, darling.’

Was this some prank from Char and Karen? Were they in here messing around?

Her brain was racing. Something was telling her this was not part of the ride. That something was badly wrong. The next instant she heard a clang as the safety bar jerked up. Then, whimpering in terror, she was jerked out of the car and dragged quickly over a hard surface. Something sharp bashed into her back and she was pulled through curtains into a room which smelt of oil. She was dropped on her back on to a hard surface. Then she heard the door clang shut. Heard a click that sounded like a switch, followed almost immediately by the grinding sound of heavy machinery. Then a torch was shining into her face, temporarily blinding her.

She stared up, almost paralysed by utter terror and confusion. Who was this? The ride operator she’d met outside?

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said.

Through the beam of light she saw the silhouette of a man’s face inside what looked like a nylon stocking with slits in it.

As she opened her mouth and tried to scream, something soft and foul-tasting was rammed into it. She heard a ripping sound and the next instant felt sticky tape being pressed over her lips and around each side of her face. She tried to scream again, but all that came out was a muffled choking sound that seemed to shimmy around inside her head.

‘You’re gagging for it, aren’t you, doll? Dressed like that? Dressed in those shoes!’

She lashed out at him with her fists, pummelling him, trying to scratch him. Then she saw something glint in the darkness. It was the head of a large claw hammer. He was holding it in a latex-gloved hand.

‘Keep still or I’ll fucking hit you.’

She still in terror, staring at the dull metal.

Suddenly she felt a crashing blow to the side of her head. Her brain filled with sparks.

Then silence.

She never felt him entering her or removing her shoes afterwards.

47

Saturday 10 January

Garry Starling entered the packed China Garden restaurant shortly after 9 p.m. and hurried towards his table, pausing only to order a Tsingtao beer from the manager, who stepped across to greet him.

‘You are late tonight, Mr Starling!’ the jovial Chinese man said. ‘I don’t think your wife is a very happy lady.’

‘Tell me something new!’ Garry replied, palming him a £20 note.

Then he hurried up the steps to his regular table and noticed that the gannets had almost finished the mixed starters. There was one solitary spring roll left in the huge bowl, and the tablecloth was littered with shreds of seaweed and stains from the spilt sauces. All three of them looked like they’d had a good few drinks.

‘Where the sodding hell have you been?’ his wife, Denise, said, greeting him with her customary acidic smile.

‘Actually I’ve been
sodding
working, my darling,’ he said, giving Maurice’s barmy-looking Earth Mother wife, Ulla, a perfunctory kiss, shaking Maurice’s hand and then sitting in the empty seat between them. He didn’t kiss Denise. He’d stopped greeting her with a kiss back in the year dot.

Turning and staring pointedly at his wife, he said, ‘Working. Right?
Working.
A word that’s not in your lexicon. Know what it means? To pay for the sodding mortgage. Your sodding credit-card bill.’

‘And your sodding camper van!’

‘Camper van?’ said Maurice, sounding astonished. ‘That’s not your style, Garry.’

‘It’s a VW. The original split-windscreen one. They’re fine investments, very collectable. Thought it would be good for Denise and me to experience the open road, sleeping out in the wild every now and then, get back to nature! I would have bought a boat, but she gets seasick.’

‘It’s midlife crisis, that what it is,’ Denise said to Maurice and Ulla. ‘If he thinks he’s taking me on holiday in a sodding van he can think again! Just like last year, when he tried to get me on the back of his motorbike to go on a blooming camping holiday in France!’

‘It’s not a sodding van!’ Garry said, grabbing the last spring roll before anyone else could get it, dipping it by mistake in the hot sauce and cramming it into his mouth.

A small thermonuclear explosion took place inside his head, rendering him temporarily speechless. Denise took good advantage of it.

‘You look like shit!’ she said. ‘How did you get that scratch on your forehead?’

‘Crawling up in a sodding loft, trying to replace an alarm wire bloody mice had eaten. A nail sticking out of a rafter.’

Denise suddenly leaned closer to him and sniffed. ‘You’ve been smoking!’

‘I was in a taxi where someone had been smoking,’ he mumbled a little clumsily, chewing.

‘Oh, really?’ She gave him a disbelieving look, then turned to their friends. ‘He keeps pretending he’s quit, but he thinks I’m stupid! He goes out to take the dog for a walk, or a bike ride, or to take his motorbike for a spin, and comes back hours later stinking of fags. You can always smell it on someone, can’t you?’ She looked a Ulla, then at Maurice and swigged some Sauvignon Blanc.

Garry’s beer arrived and he took a long pull, glancing first at Ulla, thinking that her mad hair looked even madder than usual tonight, and then at Maurice, who looked more like a toad than ever. Both of them, and Denise as well, looked strange, as if he was seeing them through distorting glass. Maurice’s black T-shirt stretched out over his pot belly, his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his expensive, hideous checked jacket, with its shiny Versace buttons, was too tight. It looked like a hand-me-down from an older brother.

Defending his friend, Maurice shook his head. ‘Can’t smell anything.’

Ulla leaned across and sniffed Garry, like a dog on heat. ‘Nice cologne!’ she said evasively. ‘Smells quite feminine, though.’

‘Chanel Platinum,’ he replied.

She sniffed again, giving a dubious frown, and raised her eyebrows at Denise.

‘So where the hell have you been?’ Denise demanded. ‘You look a mess. Couldn’t you at least have brushed your hair?’

‘It’s blowing a hooley out there, in case you haven’t noticed!’ Garry replied. ‘I had to deal with an irate client – we’re short-staffed tonight – one down with flu, one down with something else, and a bolshy Mr Graham Lewis in Steyning, whose alarm keeps going off for no reason, was threatening to change suppliers. So I had to go and sort him out. OK? Turns out it was damned mice.’

She tilted her glass into her mouth, to drain it, then realized it was already empty. At that moment a waiter appeared with a fresh bottle. Garry pointed at his own wine glass, draining his beer at the same time. His nerves were shot to hell and he needed drink right now. Lots of it.

‘Cheers, everyone!’ he said.

Maurice and Ulla raised their glasses. ‘Cheers!’

Denise took her time. She was glaring at Garry. She just did not believe him.

But, Garry thought, when had his wife last believed him about anything? He drained half of the sharp white wine in just one gulp, momentarily relieving the burning sensation in the roof of his mouth. If the truth be known, the last time she had believed him was probably on the day they got married, when he said his vows.

Although … he hadn’t even been sure then. He could still remember the look she had given him in front of the altar, as he’d slipped the ring on to her finger and got prompted through the wording by the vicar. It was not the love in her eyes that he might have expected, more the smug satisfaction of a hunter returning home with a dead animal over their shoulder.

He had nearly bailed out then.

Twelve years later, there was not a day that went by when he didn’t wish he had.

But hey. There were advantages to being married. It was important never to forget that.

Being married gave you respectability.

48

Saturday 10 January

‘I’ve had a go at the wording on the wedding invites,’ Cleo called out from the kitchen.

‘Great!’ Roy Grace said. ‘Want me to take a look?’

‘We’ll go through it when you’ve had supper.’

He smiled. One thing he was learning about Cleo was that she liked to plan things well in advance. It was going to be touch and go for the wedding to take place before their child was born. They couldn’t even set a firm date yet because of all the bureaucracy that had to be dealt with to have Sandy declared legally dead first.

Humphrey lay contentedly beside him now on Cleo’s living-room floor with a goofy grin, head flopped over, his tongue half out. Roy ran his palm back and forward across the happy creature’s soft, warm belly, while a Labour politician on the flat-screen TV on the wall pontificated on
News at Ten.

But he wasn’t listening. With his suit jacket removed and his tie loosened, his thoughts were on the evening briefing and the pages of work he had brought home, which were spread out on the sofa beside him. In particular, he was poring over the similarities between the Shoe Man and the new offender. A number of unanswered questions were going around his mind.

If the Shoe Man was back, where had he been for the past twelve years? Or if he had remained in the city, why had he stopped offending for so long? Was it possible that he had raped other victims who had not reported it?

Grace doubted that he could have raped repeatedly for twelve years without someone reporting it. Yet so far there were no rapists showing up on the national database with a comparable MO. He could of course have gone abroad, which would take a massive amount of time and resourcing to establish.

However, this evening it emerged that there was one potential suspect in the city, following the Analyst’s search of the ViSOR and MAPPA databases, ViSOR being the Violent and Sex Offender Register and MAPPA the Multi-agency Public Protection Arrangements.

Having been set up to manage the release of violent and sexual offenders back into the community after their release from prison on licence, MAPPA graded these offenders into three categories. Level 1 was for released prisoners who were considered to have a low risk of reoffending and were monitored to ensure that they complied with the terms of their licence. Level 2 was for those considered to be in need of moderately active inter-agency monitoring. Level 3 was for those considered to have a high risk of reoffending.

Zoratti had discovered that there was a Level 2 who had been released on licence, from Ford Open Prison, having served three years of a six-year sentence, mostly at Lewes, for burglary and indecent assault – a career burglar and drugs dealer, Darren Spicer. He’d attempted to kiss a woman in a house he had broken into, then run off when she’d fought back and had pressed a hidden panic button. Later, she’d picked him out in an identity parade.

Spicer’s current place of residence was being traced urgently tonight through the Probation Service. But while he was worth interviewing, Grace wasn’t convinced Darren Spicer ticked many boxes. He had been in and out of jail several times in the past twelve years, so why had he not offended in the interim? More important, in his view, was the fact that the man had no previous record of sexual assaults. The last offence that had contributed to Spicer’s sentence appeared to be a one-off – although, of course, there was no certainty of that. With the grim statistic that only 6 per cent of rape victims ever reported the crimes, it was quite possible he had committed previous such offences and got away with them.

Next he turned his mind to the copycat theory. One thing that was deeply bothering him was the missing pages from the Rachael Ryan file. Sure, it was possible that they had simply been misfiled somewhere else. But there could be a much darker reason. Could it be that the Shoe Man himself had accessed the file and removed something that might incriminate him? If he had access to that file, he would have had access to all the Shoe Man’s files.

Or was it someone else altogether who had gained access to them? Someone who had decided, for whatever sick reason, to copy the Shoe Man’s MO.

Who?

A member of his trusted team? He didn’t think so, but of course he couldn’t discount that. There were plenty of other people who had access to the Major Crime Suite – other police officers, support staff and cleaning staff. Solving that mystery, he realized, was now a priority for him.

‘Are you nearly ready to eat, darling?’ Cleo called out.

Cleo was grilling him a tuna steak. Roy took this as a sign that maybe, finally, she was starting to wean herself off curries. The reek of them had gone and there was now a strong smell of wood smoke from the crackling fire that Cleo had lit in the grate some time before he had arrived, and the welcoming aroma of scented candles burning in different parts of the room.

He took another long sip of the deliciously cold vodka martini she had mixed, enviously, for him. He now had to drink for both of them, she’d told him – and tonight he did not have a problem with that. He felt the welcoming buzz of the alcohol and then, still mechanically stroking the dog, he lapsed back into his thoughts.

A car had been seen leaving the Pearce house in The Droveway at 9 p.m. on Thursday, which fitted perfectly with the timing of the attack. It had been travelling at speed and nearly ran over a local resident. The man was so angry he tried to take a note of the number plate, but could only be certain of two digits and one letter of the alphabet. Then he did nothing about it until he read of the attack in the
Argus
, which prompted him to phone the Incident Room this evening.

According to him, the driver was male, but with the vehicle’s tinted windows he had not been able to get a clear look at his face. Somewhere in his thirties or forties with short hair was the extent of his description. He did much better with the car, asserting it was a light-coloured old-model Mercedes E-Class saloon. Just how many of those Mercedes were there around, Grace wondered? Loads of them. It was going to take a while to sift through all the registered keepers when they didn’t have a full registration number to work from. And he did not have the luxury of time.

With the rising frenzy in the media after two stranger rapes in the city in a little over a week, the news stories were ramping up fear in the public. The call handlers were being inundated with queries from anxious women about whether it was safe to go out and he was aware that his immediate superiors, Chief Superintendent Jack Skerritt and ACC Peter Rigg, were anxious to see rapid progress with this case.

The next press conference was scheduled for midday on Monday. It would calm everything down greatly if he could announce they had a suspect and, even better, that they had made an arrest. OK, they had Darren Spicer as a possible. But nothing made the police look more inefficient than having to release a suspect because of lack of evidence, or because it was the wrong person. The Mercedes was more promising. But the driver wasn’t necessarily the offender. There could be an innocent explanation – perhaps a family friend who had popped round for a visit to the Pearce household, or simply someone delivering a package?

The fact that the car was being driven recklessly was a good indicator that it might have been the suspect. It was a known fact that offenders often drove badly immediately after committing a crime – because they were in a heightened state of anxiety, the
red mist
.

He’d sent all his team home for the night to get some rest, except for the two Analysts, who were working a 24/7 rota between them. Glenn Branson had asked him for a quick pint on the way home, but he’d apologetically excused himself, having barely seen Cleo this weekend. With his mate’s marital woes spiralling from bad to worse, he was running out of sympathetic things to say to Glenn. Divorce was a grim option, especially for someone with young kids. But he could no longer see much alternative for his friend – and wished desperately that he could. Glenn was going to have to bite the bullet and move on. An easy thing to tell someone else, but an almost impossible thing to accept oneself.

He felt a sudden craving for a cigarette, but resisted, with difficulty. Cleo was not bothered if he smoked in here, or anywhere, but he was mindful of the baby she was carrying, and all the stuff about passive smoke, and the example he needed to try to set. So he drank some more, ignoring the craving.

‘Ready in about five minutes!’ she called out from the kitchen. ‘Need another drink?’ She popped her head around the door.

He raised his glass to show it was nearly empty. ‘I’ll be under the table if I have another!’

‘That’s the way I like you!’ she replied, coming over to him.

‘You’re just a control freak!’ he said with a big grin.

He would take a bullet for this woman. He would die for Cleo gladly, he knew. Without an instant’s hesitation.

Then he felt a sudden strange pang of guilt. Wasn’t this how he’d felt once about Sandy?

He tried to answer himself truthfully. Yes, it had been total hell when she disappeared. That morning on his thirtieth birthday, they had made love before he went to work, and that same evening, when he returned home, looking forward to their celebration, she had not been there – that had been total hell.

So had the days, weeks, months and then years after. Imagining all the terrible things that might have happened to her. And sometimes imagining what might still be happening to her in some monster’s lair. But that was just one of many scenarios. He’d lost count of the number of psychics he’d had consultations or sittings with over these past ten years – and not one of them had said she was in the spirit world. Despite all of them, he was reasonably certain that Sandy was dead.

In a few months’ time it would be ten years ago that she had disappeared. An entire decade, in which he’d gone from a young man to a middle-aged fart.

In which he’d met the loveliest, smartest, most incredible woman in the world.

Sometimes he woke up and imagined he must have dreamed it all. Then he would feel Cleo’s warm, naked body beside him. He would slip his arms around her and hold her tightly, the way someone might try to hold on to their dreams.

‘I love you so much,’ he would whisper.

‘Shit!’ Cleo broke away from him, breaking the spell.

There was a smell of burning as she dashed back over to the hob. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

‘It’s OK! I like it well done. I don’t like fish with its heart still beating!’

‘Just as well!’

The kitchen filled with black smoke and the stink of burning fish. The smoke alarm started beeping. Roy opened the windows and the patio door and Humphrey raced outside, barking furiously at something in his squeaky puppy bark, then raced back inside and tore around barking at the alarm.

A few minutes later, Grace sat at the table and Cleo placed a plate in front of him. On it lay a blackened tuna steak, a lump of tartare sauce, some limp-looking mangetout, and a mess of disintegrated boiled potatoes.

‘Eat that,’ she said, ‘and you are proving it’s true love!’

The television above the table was on, with the sound turned down. The politician had gone and now Jamie Oliver was energetically demonstrating how to slice the coral from scallops.

Humphrey nudged his right leg, then tried to jump up.

‘Down! No begging!’ he said.

The dog looked at him uncertainly, then slunk away.

Cleo sat down beside him and gave him a wide-eyed frown.

‘You don’t have to eat it if it’s really horrible.’

He forked some fish into his mouth. It tasted even worse than it looked, but only marginally. No question, Sandy was a better cook than Cleo. A thousand times better. But it did not matter to him one jot. Although he did glance a tad enviously at the dish Jamie Oliver was preparing.

‘So how was your day?’ he asked, dubiously forking another section of burnt fish into his mouth, thinking that the curries really had not been so bad after all.

She told him about the body of a forty-two-stone man she’d had to recover from his home. It had required the help of the fire brigade.

He listened in astounded silence, then ate some salad, which she put down on a side plate. At least she had managed not to burn that.

Switching subjects she said, ‘Hey, something occurred to me about the Shoe Man. Do you want my thoughts?’

He nodded.

‘OK, your Shoe Man –
if
it is the same offender as before and
if
he stayed in this area – I can’t see that he would have just totally stopped getting his kicks.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘If he stopped offending, for whatever reason, he must still have had urges. He would need to satisfy them. So maybe he’d go to dominatrix dungeons – or places like that – weird sex places, fetishes and stuff. Put yourself in his shoes, as it were – forgive the pun! You’re a creep who gets off on women’s shoes. OK?’

‘That’s one of our lines of enquiry.’

‘Yes, but listen. You’ve found a fun way of doing it – raping strangers in classy shoes and then taking those shoes. OK?’

He stared at her, without reacting.

‘Then, oooops! You go a bit too far. She dies. The media coverage is intense. You decide to lie low, ride it out. But …’ She hesitated. ‘You want the
but
?’

‘We don’t know for sure that anyone died. All we know is that he stopped. But tell me?’ he said.

‘You still get your rocks off on women’s feet. OK? You following me?’

‘In your footsteps? In your shoes?’

‘Sod off, Detective Superintendent!’

He raised his hand. ‘No disrespect!’

‘None taken. OK, so you are the Shoe Man, you are still turned on by feet, or by shoes. Sooner or later that thing inside you, that
urge
, is going to ride to the top. You’re going to need that. Where do you go? The Internet, that’s where you go! So you type in
feet
and
fetish
maybe and
Brighton
. Do you know what you come up with?’